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Anti-vaccine toll, U.S.

R. Andrew Hicks, a mathematics professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia, has designed a mirror that shows a much wider field of vision and will eliminate the blind spot where side and rear-view mirrors fail to overlap. The mirror covers about 45°, compared to about 16° for the mirrors in use now. See New Side-Mirror.

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Physicists use ‘God’ as a metaphor more often than other scientists—- especially in popular writing, but in the technical literature as well. Of course, this is just a metaphor for order at the heart of confusion. A rational or aesthetic pattern underlying reality is far from a theistic God. — Tanner Edis, in Is Anybody Out There?

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The Hubble telescope has taken some distant pictures of star formation. My very basic explanation is below. Follow the link for Alan Boyle’s description of the science behind this new image.
Just as each of us is in the centre of our own personal observable universe, so our earth is in the centre of astronomy’s observable universe. Light travels 186,000 miles per second. The light from our home star, the sun, takes about 9.3 minutes to reach us. The light reflected from planets takes several hours. The light from Alpha Centauri, the next nearest star, takes 4.2 years. So, when we look at distant galaxies, we are effectively looking back in time, at younger and younger objects. Thus, powerful telescopes enable us to see developments of stars and galaxies at different times in the past. Galaxy M83 is 15 million light-years away, so we are seeing it as it was 15 million years ago; and we can’t see it any older.

If we look far enough, we can see first-generation stars. The big bang, a sudden expansion of space-time, produced almost entirely hydrogen and helium, the two lightest atoms. Stars burn by fusion, joining nuclei to release energy and creating heavier atoms. They can continue until they get to iron, which has the lowest-energy nucleus. Creating heavier atoms would use up energy. After it creates iron, a sun’s nuclear fires burn down. Without the energy of fusion to keep it hot, the star collapses inwards because of its own gravity. The energy from gravity smashes iron atoms together and creates heavier atoms.

That’s how we know our sun is a second-generation star: our solar system contains heavier atoms than iron. The atoms in our body have already been through one star’s furnace.

As a book reviews editor at New Scientist, I often come across so-called science books which after a few pages reveal themselves to be harbouring ulterior motives. I have learned to recognise clues that the author is pushing a religious agenda. As creationists in the US continue to lose court battles over attempts to have intelligent design taught as science in federally funded schools, their strategy has been forced to… well, evolve. That means ensuring that references to pseudoscientific concepts like ID are more heavily veiled. So I thought I’d share a few tips for spotting what may be religion in science’s clothing.Red flag number one: the term “scientific materialism”. “Materialism” is most often used in contrast to something else – something non-material, or supernatural. Proponents of ID frequently lament the scientific claim that humans are the product of purely material forces. At the same time, they never define how non-material forces might work. I have yet to find a definition that characterises non-materialism by what it is, rather than by what it is not.

The invocation of Cartesian dualism – where the brain and mind are viewed as two distinct entities, one material and the other immaterial – is also a red flag. And if an author describes the mind, or any biological system for that matter, as “irreducibly complex”, let the alarm bells ring.

Misguided interpretations of quantum physics are a classic hallmark of pseudoscience, usually of the New Age variety, but some religious groups are now appealing to aspects of quantum weirdness to account for free will. Beware: this is nonsense.

When you come across the terms “Darwinism” or “Darwinists”, take heed. True scientists rarely use these terms, and instead opt for “evolution” and “biologists”, respectively. When evolution is described as a “blind, random, undirected process”, be warned. While genetic mutations may be random, natural selection is not. When cells are described as “astonishingly complex molecular machines”, it is generally by breathless supporters of ID who take the metaphor literally and assume that such a “machine” requires an “engineer”. If an author wishes for “academic freedom”, it is usually ID code for “the acceptance of creationism”.

Some general sentiments are also red flags. Authors with religious motives make shameless appeals to common sense, from the staid – “There is nothing we can be more certain of than the reality of our sense of self” (James Le Fanu in Why Us?) – to the silly – “Yer granny was an ape!” (creationist blogger Denyse O’Leary). If common sense were a reliable guide, we wouldn’t need science in the first place.

Religiously motivated authors also have a bad habit of linking the cultural implications of a theory to the truth-value of that theory. The ID crowd, for instance, loves to draw a line from Darwin to the Holocaust, as they did in the “documentary” film Expelled: No intelligence allowed. Even if such an absurd link were justified, it would have zero relevance to the question of whether or not the theory of evolution is correct. Similarly, when Le Fanu writes that Darwin’s On the Origin of Species “articulated the desire of many scientists for an exclusively materialist explanation of natural history that would liberate it from the sticky fingers of the theological inference that the beauty and wonder of the natural world was direct evidence for ‘A Designer'”, his statement has no bearing on the scientific merits of evolution.

It is crucial to the public’s intellectual health to know when science really is science. Those with a religious agenda will continue to disguise their true views in their effort to win supporters, so please read between the lines.

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The Out Campaign

“Atheism is a religion like 'not collecting stamps' is a hobby.”
―Penn Jillette“If atheism is a religion, then bald is a hair color” ―Mark Schnitzius"If atheism is a religion, then health is a disease!" —Clark Adams